20 Fabulous Photographs of Animals

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How to Drop Off the Face of the Earth - Forever

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How to Ditch Big Brother and Disappear Forever So you've decided you want to drop off the map and leave Big Brother behind. It's harder than ever in our always-connected world, but if you're ready to plan your big vanishing act, here are a few tips to get you started. Who hasn't thought about how nice it would be to start fresh somewhere new, preferably with nicer weather and cheaper drinks? Whatever your reasons for wanting to disappear—maybe you just want to get The Man off your back—with enough diligence and planning you can vanish and start anew somewhere else. For the low down on disappearing and starting your life over, we turned to the book How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace by Frank M. Ahearn and Eileen C. Horan. Frank Ahearn is the grizzled grandfather of the vanishing act. After 20 odd years working as a skip tracer—an investigator who specializes in finding people who don't want to be found—he realized he could make just as much money and incur a lot less risk helping people avoid investigators like himself. We've culled a few of Ahearn's tips below, but if you're really serious, his book is a great pocket guide to getting lost. Photo adapted from the Australia edition of How to Disappear. How Not to Disappear The cardinal sin in any serious disappearance is drama. You don't successfully vanish by staging an elaborate disappearing act that ultimately involves a tri-state search, police dogs, and your home town believing that you were mauled by a bear and dragged off into the dark night. Ahearn stresses the importance of disappearing in a legal fashion. You shouldn't, for example, try and secure false papers: It's a felony to use false identification, and you have no idea if the papers you secured are legitimate. (What if your new social security number belongs to a dead guy or a criminal? What if the passport you bought is bogus and now you're staring down a customs agent?). Instead, you want to obfuscate your identity in a way that it's so difficult for people to follow you that anything short of a government task force will lack for the patience or funding to keep doggedly trying to find you. Here's a little about how that might work. Photo by David McDermott. Minimize Your Social Connections People who hurriedly throw all their crap in a suitcase and run out the back door are the ones who fail at disappearing. Instead, one of your most important jobs, prior to your successful disappearance, is to slowly cut the fat from your social life. Stop using Facebook—ditch all social networks—maybe under the pretense that you're spending too much time online (or any other pretense that people around you will accept besides "I'm going to torch my crappy life and move to Belize"). You want to minimize the social footprint you occupy so that when suddenly you're not standing in it anymore, few people will notice or care. If you're the most prominent member of the local social scene and you vanish tomorrow, people will notice. Minimizing your virtual trail is more important than minimizing your real life trail. It takes mere minutes for an investigator to comb through social networks and search results, but hours and additional expenses to investigate on foot and by phone. Photo by Luis Perez. The one social connection most people are unwilling to ditch is communication with their immediate family. Unless your immediate family is the reason you're pulling a vanishing act, chances are you'll still want to talk to your parents or siblings. This can the toughest communication to break, and it's where almost everyone fails. All the planning in the world is worthless if you call your relatives from your new location and a skip tracer gets her hands on the phone records. If you want to communicate with your family or best friend after you've vanished from the less desirable people in your life, then you need to figure out, well in advance, how you will do so. Never communicate with them directly from any account linked to your new life or new residence. Anonymous email accounts and prepaid phone cards and cellphones are the only way you're going to be finding out if Grandma's hip surgery went well. Ditch the Plastic; Cash Is King Get used to the idea of ditching the luxuries you had in your former life. Gone are the credit cards, the convenience cards and loyalty cards, even simple things like a video rental card. Pay cash for everything and don't use anything that could link your new life and your plans to your old life. Don't check out books about Chile from your local library or buy them with a credit card. Don't use a credit card or frequent flier miles to book a flight out of the country. Your goal in everything you do is to minimize the number of connections between your old life and your new life. Whenever you undertake an interaction with another person or business, ask yourself "Is this the least traceable method I could use?" Paying cash for a cup of coffee at an old coffee shop? Obscure. Paying with a credit card for a cup of coffee at an airport kiosk under the eye of four different security cameras? Not stealthy in the least. Cash is king. Photo by Andrew Magill. Lie, Lie, and Lie Some More Ahearn goes into intense detail on the topic of disinformation and its importance in disappearing. He notes that the thing skip tracers hope for most is just enough information—too little and they'll never find their prey, too much and they'll waste all their time and funding looking in the wrong places. Your goal is to create disinformation. As you prepare to disappear, slowly but surely start fudging the information companies have on you. "Correct" the spelling of your name on file with the local utility company, tell them they have the wrong social security number and offer a correction, change your mailing address for your bills to a fake mail drop you set up through a private mailing company. If people come looking for you, you want them to waste their time looking in the wrong places. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 of Ahearn's book are all devoted entirely to disinformation, creating false leads (with examples from his work that are so clever you'll want to hire him just to see him in action), and establishing yourself securely in a new locale. Photo by Anonymous9000. Incorporation, The Binding Glue At this point you might be nodding your head, thinking that the plan sounds great so far, save for the one glaring detail. If you can't use anything but cash how on earth are you going to establish a new identity in your new location? Since you don't want to lead the life of an illegal alien in your new locale, you're going to need some way to have a legal presence that isn't intimately tied back to your old identity. Creating a corporation to manage your assets is one way many people handle their affairs once they have disappeared. Your corporation, only vaguely linked to you and not in the way that is readily identifiable to skip tracers, will be the entity that leases your apartment, pays your utility bills, and otherwise delegates your money out while serving as a shield between you and those looking for you. The details of this are best discussed between you and a lawyer or after careful research into what kind of corporation (and where) would be the best fit for you. Photo by Diana. Lastly: Don't Bother If You're Not Committed Disappearing is not easy. You don't just fake your own death, buy some false papers in an alley from a guy with an indiscernible accent, and then retire to a life of leisure on a small island nation. Disappearing, and doing so legally and without incurring a bigger headache than the one you're running away from, takes careful planning. You need to be willing to cut contact with nearly everyone you know (if not everyone), change how you shop, and even ditch your hobbies. Disappearing means beginning a game of chase with people who want to find you and being willing and strong enough to outlive them at that game. If you can't do that, you'll waste a lot of time and money trying to disappear but failing. Photo by Bohari Adventures. Further Reading The total planning and execution of your disappearance is well beyond the scope of this article. If you're seriously entertaining the idea of disappearing, we highly recommend checking out Ahearn's book How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace. If you're serious about vanishing, it offers insights and tips you likely never even thought about. If, like most of us, you're not serious about vanishing, it's still packed with fascinating stories culled from the hundreds of clients Frank has helped vanish from their old life and start a fresh one more to their liking. Either way you'll end up a little more paranoid about your privacy and security and a lot more knowledgeable about the ways people abuse both. Read more at lifehacker.com

 

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Build a Hackintosh Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

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How to Build a Hackintosh Mac and Install OS X in Eight Easy Steps Building a Hackintosh from scratch—that is, installing Mac OS X on non-Mac hardware—has never been easier, and the final product has never performed better. Here's how it works. Note: This is our third and most recent Hackintosh build (here are the now-outdated first and second). This time, to make things really easy on you, we put together a video walkthrough of the entire process. You can watch the video in its entirety below, but we've also broken up the video next to the accompanying text in each step below. The Full Step by Step in Video Form Best viewed in 720p. Background music by Pex "Mahoney" Tufvession. What You'll Need Before you get started building your Hackintosh, you will, of course, need a few supplies. The Hardware There's no such thing as a definitive Hackintosh build, and you can find plenty of hardware that will run OS X using this or a similar method, but we're not going to dive into every possible option here. Instead, I've put together a list of the hardware I'm using and that I can guarantee runs like a dream (or at least it does for me). Also, the installation process below is tailored to this hardware; you can still build a Hackintosh using other hardware, but this installation process may not work 100%. Here's all the hardware I bought off Newegg for this Hackintosh build: Antec Sonata III Case with 500W Power Supply ASUS P7P55D-E Pro ATX Intel Motherboard EVGA GeForce 9500 GT 01G-P3-N959-TR Video Card Intel Core i7-860 2.8GHz LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Processor G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory x 2 (for a total of 8GB); the amount of RAM you choose is optional. OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD3-2VTX120G 3.5" MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD): This SSD isn't strictly necessary, but in our opinion, SSDs are one of the best upgrades you can make. Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive LITE-ON DVD Writer - Bulk - Black SATA Model iHAS224-06 LightScribe Support In all, the subtotal on Newegg for all that hardware is $1,123.92; skip the SSD and the second set of RAM, and you've still got a solid machine for an even more reasonable $828.92. Once you've got all your hardware, you'll need to assemble your computer. Putting together the hardware for your Hackintosh is just like building any other computer from scratch. You mount the motherboard to your case, install your CPU, RAM, graphics card, storage and optical drive, and plug in all the necessary cables. It's always a good idea to read over your motherboard's instruction manual, but if you want a little more help, hit up our first-timer's guide to building a computer from scratch. The only thing you need to know is that you shouldn't plug your SATA drives into the off-white SATA ports at the bottom of the board. All the rest should work fine. The Software On the software end of the spectrum, you'll need a few things. Apart from the obvious (the Snow Leopard install DVD), you'll need to download some files that'll contain the tools that let you install OS X on your machine. The method I'm using to install OS X on our Hackintosh this time around is a new one by a guy called tonymacx86, and it's really great. I've added direct links to the downloads below, but all credit goes to tonymac for the dead-simple tools. A Mac OS X 10.6 Install DVD (which you can buy from Apple) MacOSXUpdateCombo10.6.4 package (free from Apple) iBoot (from tonymacx86; find the iBoot download link on this post below step two) MultiBeast (also from tonymacx86; find the MultiBeast download link on this page below step three) Other post-installation files I'd suggest downloading everything you need now, and putting MultiBeast, the Mac OS X Combo update, and the post-installation files on a thumb drive. Install OS X on Your Hackintosh At this point you should have assembled your PC, and have all the software you'll need to install OS X on your Hackintosh. Now it's time for the fun—and easy—part. The process this time around is surprisingly simple, but I'll still walk you through the process step by step. Step One: Burn iBoot to a Disc Above I told you to download iBoot from tonymacx86. If you haven't already, unzip iBoot.zip and extract iBoot.iso. Now it's time to burn the file to a CD or DVD. (It's a small bootloader, so a CD will work just fine.) In Windows: Insert a blank disc, right-click iBoot.iso, and click Burn disc image. Select your disc burner in the next Windows prompt, and hit Burn. On OS X: Insert a blank disc, right-click iBoot.iso, and click Burn "iBoot.iso" to Disc. Burning the disc shouldn't take more than a minute or so, and iBoot should be ready to go. Step Two: Adjust Your BIOS Now that you've got the iBoot disc ready, it's time to turn on your soon-to-be-Hackintosh and adjust the BIOS so your computer's OS X-friendly. So make sure you've plugged in a keyboard, monitor, and power, and fire it up. Note: At the time of this guide, I'm using the latest BIOS for this motherboard: P7P55D-E-PRO-ASUS-1002.ROM. When you get to the first boot screen, press the Delete key to open up your BIOS. Once inside, you'll need to make a few adjustments. On the first BIOS screen, arrow down to the entry labeled Storage Configuration, hit Enter, and change "Configure SATA as" to AHCI. Press Escape once. Next, arrow over to the Advanced tab, then arrow down to the section labeled Onboard Devices Configuration. Hit Enter, find the Marvell 9123 SATA Controller entry, and set it to AHCI. Press Escape. Now arrow over to the Power section and set Suspend Mode to S3 only. Finally, arrow over to the Boot tab, hit Enter on Boot Device Priority, and set your first boot device to boot first from your DVD drive, then set your second boot device as your primary hard drive. Hit F10 to save your changes and exit the BIOS. Step Three: Boot from iBoot into the Snow Leopard Install DVD When your system restarts, put the iBoot disc you burned above into the DVD drive. Assuming you set everything correctly in your BIOS, iBoot should boot into the screen below. When you get to this screen, eject your iBoot disc, insert the Snow Leopard install DVD, and press F5 on your keyboard. In few seconds, the iBoot disc in the center should be replaced by a new disc labeled Mac OS X Install DVD. (If it doesn't right away, wait a few seconds and hit F5 again.) Once it does, hit Enter, and your computer will boot into the Snow Leopard installation wizard. Step Four: Format Your Disk and Install OS X After a minute or two of loading up, you should be looking at the Snow Leopard installation wizard. Select your language and continue. Before you get started with the installation, however, you'll need to format your hard drive so you can install OS X. So, from the file menu at the top of the screen, select Utilities -> Disk Utility. Once Disk Utility loads, click on your hard drive in the sidebar and select the tab labeled Partition. Set the Volume Scheme drop-down to 1 Partition (unless you have a reason for wanting otherwise), name the volume whatever name you want, and set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Now click the Options button and ensure that GUID Partition Table is selected as the partition scheme. Now that everything's set, hit Apply. When you're prompted for confirmation, click Partition. In twenty seconds or so, your drive should be formatted and you'll be ready to install OS X. Quit Disk Utility, and continue with the installer. The installation is completely straightforward, so just follow along with the default settings. When the installation finishes (the time will vary—it always claims it'll take 30+ minutes, but is normally done in 10 to 20), you'll most likely see the Install Failed screen pictured below. Don't panic! This is all part of the process. Just click restart, put iBoot back in the drive, and this time, when your computer restarts, iBoot's Chameleon bootloader will give you the option to boot into your new installation. Select it and hit Enter. Step Five: Update but Don't Restart The first time OS X loads, you'll see Snow Leopard's fancy welcome video. Once that's done, OS X will walk you through the setup wizard, during which you'll enter in your username, location, etc. Just follow along. Once you're finished with the setup, you're finally at your new Hackintosh desktop. Since you probably want to use the most up-to-date release, you'll want to update your Hackintosh before adding the finishing touches. At the time of this writing, 10.6.4 is the most current release, so if you didn't already download the update package above (remember, we told you to put it on your thumb drive?), grab the MacOSXUpdateCombo10.6.4 package from Apple, double-click on the DMG, and run the installer. When the combo update finishes, you'll be prompted to reboot. Don't reboot your computer—at least not yet. You've got one thing you need to do first. Step Six: Run the MultiBeast Package Remember the MultiBeast download from tonymacx86 that we grabbed earlier and stored on a thumb drive (along with other post installation files)? It's time to use it. Make sure you've plugged your thumb drive into your Hackintosh (or just re-download the files if you forgot to save them to a thumb drive) and open MultiBeast. This tool will allow you to boot from your hard drive going forward, so you don't need to use iBoot every time you want to boot up OS X. On the Install MultiBeast screen, tick the checkboxes next to EasyBeast and System Utilities, then click Continue. When the EasyBeast installation completes, eject the iBoot disc and restart your computer. Once you've rebooted, you've got one more step to go. Step Seven: Copy Custom Kexts to Extra Folder, Manually Add Sound and Ethernet Kexts Using Kext Utility Now it's time to use those other post-installation files you downloaded earlier. So dive into the folder named Post Install and open the folder named Extra/Extensions. In a separate Finder window, navigate to the /Extra/Extensions folder at the root of your drive (in Finder, you can just type Cmd+Shift+G, type /Extra/Extensions, and press Enter). Now drag all the files from your thumb drive's Extra/Extensions folder into your hard drive's Extra/Extensions folder. Enter your password when prompted, and let Finder replace any files that already exist. Finally, navigate back to the Post Install folder on your thumb drive. Inside you'll see three files: An app named Kext Utility and two kext files named VoodooHDA.kext and RealtekR1000SL.kext. Drag and drop VoodooHDA.kext onto Kext Utility (enter your password when prompted), and you'll see a window like the one above. Once it says Done, you can quit Kext Utility (click Cancel), and then this time drag and drop Realtek R1000SL.kext onto Kext Utility. (Basically this installs custom audio and Ethernet extensions to your system so they work as you'd expect.) Step Eight: Restart and Enjoy! Now that you've updated and installed a few extensions customized to your hardware, you're ready to restart your computer, boot directly from your hard drive, and enjoy your new Hackintosh. A Note on Performance and Other Loose Ends I've been using this system for a couple weeks now, and in all my testing, everything's been working like a charm. If you're interested in benchmarking, here's how my build fared on Xbench (spoiler: the total score was 303.38). As I mentioned above, you don't need to buy a pricey SSD (a regular hard drive will work fine), but the system with the SSD is fast, especially on startup. I've added a handful of startup applications to my login items, including apps like Chrome. When my system boots, all of my startup applications are running before my desktop fades in from blue—it feels more like resuming from sleep than rebooting. Another thing to note: About this Mac identifies the processor as i5, but it's a superficial issue. You could manually edit the text file that populates those fields, but I won't go into that here. Finally, keep your iBoot disc handy. In the event something does go flaky, especially if you end up having any problems booting directly from your hard drive, you'll likely want that iBoot disc on hand for troubleshooting. Huge thanks go out to my Hackintosh-helping pals Onetrack, Stellarola, and Davide, to tonymacx86 for his great tools and work, to videographer extraordinaire Adam Dachis, and to the Hackintosh community. Read more at lifehacker.com

 

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Kylo - TV Optimized Web Browser

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Kylo Is a Big-Screen, TV-Optimized Web Browser Windows/Mac: Kylo is a Mozilla-based web browser optimized for surfing the web on your HDTV from the comfort of your couch. Check out our screenshot tour to see it in all its 10-foot display glory. Kylo was designed to complement the nifty gyroscopic mouse—produced by Kylo's parent company—called The Loop. While The Loop is pretty sweet and we certainly wouldn't mind field testing one, for our testing we just used a regular old wireless keyboard and mouse hooked up to our HTPC. Kylo shines without any fancy peripherals, although it's certainly a great ambassador for The Loop. Kylo is optimized to be easy on your eyes and to make browsing the web from your couch as comfortable as possible. The address and toolbar are located on the bottom of the screen—looking down repeatedly towards the bottom of the screen is more eye-friendly than looking up to the top of the screen, it's also a better spot for good contrast if the TV is mounted too high.) They tailored everything from the buttons to the visual bookmarks for fumble-free clicking when the screen is far away. We took both screenshots and actual photographs of Kylo in action. The photograph at the top of this article is of Kylo as viewed from a spot on the couch dead center to the television and approximately 13 feet away. Our tireless office helper Spawn volunteered to sit in for a sense of scale. The photographs of Kylo and Firefox—seen below—were taken from standing height approximately 18 feet away from the screen. We grabbed screenshots of same screens we photographed for those of you that wanted a clearer picture of the interface: Kylo is a free offering from Hillcrest Labs, the company behind The Loop. The Loop is not required to use Kylo but an input device of some sort is—Kylo sports an on-screen qwerty keyboard, it's possible to go mouse-only. The only complaint, in fact, we can log against Kylo has nothing to do with Kylo itself—the jerks at Hulu decided to block Kylo the day Kylo publicly launched their browser. It was disappointing to load up Hulu only to have all the videos blocked. That said there are plenty of fish in the media sea and you can take your eyes elsewhere. Have experience Kylo or The Loop? Let's hear about it in the comments. Can't quite let go of Firefox for your couch-based browsing? Check out how to set up a 10-foot display in Firefox so you can keep your add-ons and other tweaks. Kylo is freeware, Windows and Mac only. Thanks n00ge! Kylo [via @n00ge] Read more at lifehacker.com

 

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How To: XBMC Start to Finish

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The Ultimate Start to Finish Guide to Your XBMC Media Center XBMC is a fantastic and free cross-platform media center application we're nuts for. If you've wanted to start using it or just wanted to customize the XBMC installation you're already running, this guide will walk you through everything, from installation to total customization. We've featured quite a few XBMC tips, tricks, and guides here at Lifehacker. We're quite fond of it, and with good reason: It's attractive, powerful, and highly customizable. In fact, nearly everyone at Lifehacker has a copy installed somewhere—and I have XBMC networked and running on every television and computer in my house. Rather than leave you to dig through the archives of all the tips and guides we've shared, today we're going to walk you through our guides covering everything from installation to tweaking your media and media center for the ultimate XBMC experience, start to finish. Rather than rehash the detailed instructions we've laid out in various guides, we'll highlight the most compelling reasons for each tweak and direct you back to the original guide for a step-by-step walk through. When you're done, you'll have a streamlined media center with some awesome skins, a tidy media collection, automatic television show downloading, and games! Install XBMC XBMC originated as an ambitious media center project on the original Xbox, but has since grown well beyond the capabilities of its platform of origin. While our step-by-step guide to turning a classic Xbox into a killer media center is still a great way to breathe life into an old Xbox, the old Pentium III in the classic Xbox is showing its age. If you're using the classic Xbox you can follow along with the suggestions in this guide, but keep in mind that the original Xbox can't handle some of the flashier skins. Everyone can grab a copy of XBMC for their respective operating system here. For additional guidance you'll want to check out our guides to installing XBMC on a USB drive, on a Mac, or if you have any troubles with the straightforward Windows install, check out the XBMC for Windows wiki. On the other hand, if you're feeling ambitious—and have a little extra cash to spend on this project—you'll definitely want to check out our guide to building a silent and standalone XBMC media center on the cheap. It really is dead silent, tiny, an excellent upgrade path from the classic Xbox architecture. Imagine squishing your classic Xbox down to the size of a paperback book—see the picture above—and upgrading the video output to 1080 and you've got the awesome nettop-based XBMC build we put together. Even if you don't opt to buy a new nettop for the project, using the XBMC LiveCD to install XBMC on an older machine is a great way to turn an otherwise lacking machine into a great, dedicated HTPC for media playback. I've installed XBMC from the LiveCD onto many an older box that wouldn't have done very well with Windows + XBMC for Windows but does HD playback easily with the lightweight version of Ubuntu that installs with XBMC from the LiveCD. Set Up Your Remote Some people will have it easier than others when it comes to configuring their remotes. The classic Xbox works with the Microsoft DVD playback kit right out of the box. If you're running XBMC on Linux (like our silent standalone build, you can use Windows Media Center remotes just fine—but good luck using that Windows Media Center remote on a Windows machine running XBMC without a big hassle (go figure!). Mac users can read about configuring the Apple remote in our guide here or jump directly to the XBMC for Mac wiki. Be forewarned that in some situations, especially on Windows, configuring IR remotes to work with XBMC can be a chore. On Windows, I've used both LIRC for Windows and EventGhost with success. You can read up on LIRC with our guide here or see an example of using EventGhost with XBMC here. Speaking from experience here, once you get your remote configured just the way you want, make sure—extra, extra sure!—to back up your remote configuration file from your respective application. It's a pain to set up remote configuration files, but if you back it up, you'll only be doing it once. Configuring the basic remote is a great start and many people won't need to venture beyond the basics, but this would hardly be a comprehensive guide if we didn't cover some of the other neat ways you can interact with your XBMC. After recently upgrading to an Android-based phone, I started experimenting with this Android remote control for XBMC—seen in the screenshot above—which essentially turns my phone into a wireless touchscreen remote that can access any of my XBMCs and browse their music and movie collections. If you have an Android, iPhone, or Windows Mobile phone, you'll want to check out the remote applications available for them. I can't say enough good things about Android remote control for XBMC. It even supports multiple XBMCs so I can swap music in one part of the house while queuing up a movie in another—amazing! Even if you don't have a phone, you can still enhance your XBMC experience with computer-based remotes. XBMC has a built-in web server with a remote tool and a variety of small applications like XBMC Control—seen in the screenshot above—make it easy to control your music or video playback from your netbook, laptop, or desktop—quite handy for changing the music playing through the living room stereo from your office. Check out our full guide to enhancing your XBMC experience with remote controls for any device for more information. Make It Pretty With each new generation of XBMC, the default skin becomes more beautiful. Even with a great default, there are tons of stunning skins that make exploring alternatives to the default quite worthwhile. We highlighted five awesome ones here, and you can browse even more at the official XBMC site—the video above is of Aeon, one of the more ambitious skins around. Aside from actually enjoying your media, showcasing it with a beautiful, easy-to-navigate skin is probably the best part of XBMC. Without fail, every visitor who sees my setup asks me how much I paid for it and has trouble believing that something as polished and awesome as XBMC is available for free. There simply isn't a commercial media player that comes close to the "The future is now!" vibe of XBMC. I won't point fingers, but having played around with many of the commercial media devices on the market, most of them have interfaces that look like they hail from last century. Read up on skinning your XBMC install here. If you want to keep on top of the latest skin developments and really see how far designers are pushing XBMC, you'll want to keep an eye on the skinning forum at XBMC.org. You'll find sub-forums there for popular skinning projects like Aeon, Confluence, and more. I've logged quite a bit of time over the years reading posts on the XBMC forums; it's a great place to get very specific help on nearly everything related to XBMC from install issues to little tweaks for your favorite skins. Massage Your Media for Maximum Wow Factor If showing off a glossy new skin catches peoples attention, you won't believe how impressed they are that you can do things like display all movies with a certain actress in them, browse by director, or at a glance look over the media information and see immediately if a movie is in HD, what kind of audio channel it uses, and see a summary of the movie or view a trailer. Earlier this year we put together an extensive guide to getting your media collection in shape for XBMC. While the XBMC media scrapers do an admirable job on their own, there's no substitute for storing information about your media collection with the actual media collection instead of in the XBMC database. Things run faster, restoration after a hard drive crash or an XBMC reinstallation takes minutes—instead of hours, hours, and more hours of rescraping your collection—and you get fine tuned control over your media. If you've ever had to leave your XBMC running for a 12 hour marathon of movie and music scraping or you've been annoyed at frequent mistakes from scrapers, you should take the time to clean up your media and start storing the media info with the media itself and not within the XBMC database. It's not as intimidating or as time consuming as it sounds, but you'll definitely want to make a weekend project of it if you've got a huge collection. Just be prepared to continually explain to guests that you didn't pay anything for the awesomeness they are experiencing. Automate TV Show Downloads If you use your XBMC to watch downloaded and ripped television shows, you really need a system in place to automate the process before you get buried under unwatched and weirdly named episodes. Check out this guide to fully automating the flow of television shows from the tubes to your XBMC server to learn how to take television shows from torrents to neatly named and filed away without any interaction on your part. If you've never wrestled with cataloging lots of television shows before, we can't emphasize enough how much time an automated system like this will save you. XBMC isn't a TiVo but with an automatic workflow like the one outlined here, it might as well be. Fun and Games We all have projects we've been intending to get around to doing but never find time for. Ever since I switched from using the classic Xbox to using a PC running XBMC, I missed the games. My old Xbox was set up with emulators and I had my old Xbox games on it too. When I moved to a new machine I never got around to setting up the game section of XBMC until Whitson wrote up an awesome tutorial on how to turn XBMC into a video game console. Check out the tutorial to see how to use XBMC to catalog your computer games, emulators, and how to play them all with an Xbox 360 controller. Thanks to the guide, the only thing I missed from my classic Xbox is back in my media center menu. You don't need games on a media center, of course, but we're building the ultimate media center. The real measure of the ultimate media center is if it will stream the Super Mario Bros. movie, showcase the Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, and let you play Super Mario Bros. 3. Not to engage in some "Back when I was a lad..." nostalgia but I would have killed for a guide like this when I first started with XBMC. Back in the early days of XBMC, if you had a question about how something worked you hit up Google, the XBMC forums, and dug until you found some answers. Every new thing involved crazy tweaks, tinkering, swearing, and more digging in the forums for answers. Thankfully XBMC has evolved and now somebody with no prior experience can take a guide like this, work their way from the top of the list to the bottom, and be rewarded with a jaw dropping media center when they're done. Speaking of lists, if you're feeling a little overwhelmed at all the stuff that goes into tweaking XBMC into an ultimate media center, check out the list below and schedule each step onto your calendar: Download and install XBMC (also check out our silent nettop build) Set up your remote. Slap on some new skins! Clean up your media. Automate TV show downloading and sorting. Install emulators and link to your installed games. Invite your friends over to check out your awesome handiwork! Have a favorite XBMC tweak or tip? Stuck trying to figure out how to do something with XBMC? Sound off in the comments to share your tweaks or get some help. Read more at lifehacker.com

 

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